Free Beer !

[Brains]

Motorhome attempt at getting free beer

Ten drivers face prosecution after blocking the emergency services from getting to a crash on the M6.
The motorway was closed for most of Friday after a lorry carrying beer collided with a camper van and a car and shed its load of bottles and crates over the northbound carriageway at about 14:00 BST.
Lancashire Police said vehicles that used to hard shoulder to exit at Junction 28 delayed the 999 response and their drivers will have to go to court.
Seven people were hurt, but their injuries were not thought to be life-threatening, the force said.
In an update on X, Lancashire Road Police said, external: "Following the collision on M6 between J27 and 28 Friday afternoon emergency vehicles were prevented from access to the scene due to drivers using hard shoulder to exit at J28.
"Notice of intended prosecutions have been posted to drivers of all ten of these vehicles."

 

[Spriddler]

Same last year on the M25, stationary for nearly an hour. Many of us got out of vehicles and were chatting to pass the time. A copper was at the top of the exit road booking the stream of daft drivers who had gone up/blocked the hard shoulder to get to the exit road and emergency vehicles couldn't get to the scene. How we all laughed, we did!

 

[Bramidan]

With a bit of traffic management ( seems something that doesn’t happen in the UK) I feel sure they could have directed traffic onto the hard shoulder to clear the tail back. They have communications don’t they?
Shaming the people who used the hard shoulder to exit but little said about “smart motorways”
How about introducing the practice from abroad where inside lane gets over as far as able as does the outside lane, leaving a gap between the two for emergency vehicles?
In the UK the practice seems to be “lets close the motorway for as long, both in time and distance, as we can”
Each incident is different and requires a different approach, there always seem to be enough people standing about with their vehicles doing nothing.

 

[Brains]

With a bit of traffic management ( seems something that doesn’t happen in the UK) I feel sure they could have directed traffic onto the hard shoulder to clear the tail back. They have communications don’t they?
Shaming the people who used the hard shoulder to exit but little said about “smart motorways”
How about introducing the practice from abroad where inside lane gets over as far as able as does the outside lane, leaving a gap between the two for emergency vehicles?
In the UK the practice seems to be “lets close the motorway for as long, both in time and distance, as we can”
Each incident is different and requires a different approach, there always seem to be enough people standing about with their vehicles doing nothing.

I agree that the standard practice elsewhere in Europe of leaving a large space between the lanes when stationary makes total sense.
However that is for what we call dual carriageways, which typically have a minimal hard shoulder.
Europe has many more miles of dual carriageway than the UK,
as the UK was 3 decades late in joining the motorway revolution, most of ours are 3 lanes wide.

I'm also with you on "Smart" Lanes, which are a brilliant bit of branding, as the one thing they are not, is "Smart"!
Some Civil Servant should have won an advertising award for that one!
However the Advertising Authority should have clamped down on blatant mis-selling

To call "Smart" Lanes the a far more accurate name of "Danger Lanes" or "Suicide Lanes" does not 'sell' the idea.